From a diseased tree comes poisonous fruit. The tree of Black Lives Matter is rotten from the roots, having grown out of the same fetid morass of Marxism and black supremacism as the Black Panthers before it. Heather Mac Donald takes stock of the harvest:

The year 2020 likely saw the largest percentage increase in homicides in American history. Murder was up nearly 37% in a sample of 57 large and medium-size cities. Based on preliminary estimates, at least 2,000 more Americans, most of them black, were killed in 2020 than in 2019.

The explosion of violent crime was precipitated by the War on Police — i.e., the eagerness of the liberal establishment to side with criminals against law and order in its embrace of Black Lives Matter.

The local murder increases in 2020 were startling: 95% in Milwaukee, 78% in Louisville, Ky., 74% in Seattle, 72% in Minneapolis, 62% in New Orleans, and 58% in Atlanta, according to data compiled by crime analyst Jeff Asher.

Liberals champion the BLM anti-police agenda to demonstrate that they revere blacks, which they have been told is the primary distinguishing characteristic of good people. Yet the dozens of children who have been killed in this bloodbath are overwhelmingly black.

Fifty-five children were killed in Chicago in 2020, 17 in St. Louis, and 11 in Philadelphia. In South Los Angeles alone, 40 children were shot, some non-lethally, through September.

The liberal establishment that caused this tries to blame it on COVID-19.

But crime fell during the first months of the pandemic shutdowns, both in the U.S. and globally. Only at the end of May did that trend reverse itself…

On May 25, George Floyd died, apparently of a fentanyl overdose, while in police custody. This was seized upon as a pretext for widespread violence that was aggressively supported by the liberal establishment, with the media barking Black Lives Matter talking points, ball players kneeling in obeisance to rioters, corporations donating $millions to BLM and related organizations, Kamala Harris egging on rioters and raising funds to bail them out of jail, and local Democrat politicians giving the rioters free reign to inflict mayhem at the expense of law-abiding citizens.

According to the establishment narrative, cops are now the bad guys.

Officers believe they face a political and legal environment that is eager to sacrifice them in the name of racial justice.

As might be expected, they are now keeping their heads down instead of doing their jobs.

An Oakland, Calif., officer who has arrested dozens of known murderers and gang members over his career tells me he is scared for the first time, “not because the criminals are necessarily more violent, even though they are.” But if he has to use force on a resisting suspect, he could lose his career, his life, or his liberty, he says. A “simple cost-benefit analysis” recommends simply responding to calls for service and collecting a paycheck. “All cops now understand this.”

Criminals understand it too. The result is increasingly brazen lawlessness.

Forget about the proactive police work that prevents crime from happening in the first place. According to liberal ideology, it is racist.

Across the country, specialized police units that got guns off the street were disbanded, since they were said to have a disparate impact on African-Americans. Police chiefs and prosecutors have refused to enforce low-level quality-of-life laws for the same reason.

The broken windows approach that allowed Rudy Giuliani and William Bratton to clean up New York City in the 1990s would be unthinkable now.

The consequence: More gang members are carrying guns, since their chances of being stopped are slim. They are enthusiastically killing each other and innocent bystanders out of opportunism, not economic deprivation or existential angst.

Democrats will respond to this by confiscating firearms from law-abiding citizens, so that we have no chance to defend ourselves.

2020 is finally over. If only we could say the same for the chaos liberalism has unleashed. 2021 has been more of the same:

Shootings in South Los Angeles rose 742% in the first two weeks of the year. In Oakland, homicides were up 500% and shootings up 126% through Jan. 17. In New York, murders were up 42% and shooting victims up 15% through Jan. 17.

According to the media, everything will get better, now that Biden’s handlers control the White House. In reality, everything will get worse:

During the campaign, [Biden] claimed without justification that African-Americans rightly feared that their loved ones could be killed by a cop every time they stepped outside. His criminal-justice blueprint promises to eliminate racial disparities in law enforcement. Given vast racial disparities in the commission of crimes, that can be done only by eliminating law enforcement itself.

The federal government will now impose the same demented leftist policies that have been making our largest cities uninhabitable.

[T]he Biden Justice Department will treat disparate stop or arrest rates as evidence of police bias and seek to put as many police departments as possible under costly consent decrees. It will even try to extend its oversight authority to local prosecutors’ offices, should district attorneys generate racially disparate charging data (an inevitability, in light of the reality of crime).

Attempting to shoehorn reality into a delusional ideology inevitably causes a great deal of pain.

High-profile homicide trials of police officers will take place this year in Minneapolis, Atlanta, Louisville and Rochester, N.Y. If there are acquittals, more riots—followed by an even greater shooting surge—seem likely.

Alternatively, officers innocent of the crimes they are accused of may be sent to prison as sacrificial offerings to the Black Lives Matter mob. This will have an even worse effect, emboldening the mob and demoralizing the police still further.

Civilization is more delicate than people realize. If we do not cure ourselves of liberalism soon, it will collapse.

On a tip from Varla.

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